The Star Online: Lifestyle: Arts & Fashion
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Arts & Fashion |
- Simon Cowell's RM33mil 'X Factor' musical croaks after 6 weeks at West End
- Picasso's masterpiece 'Guernica' gets a special dance performance
- Grease musical is the word on TV
| Simon Cowell's RM33mil 'X Factor' musical croaks after 6 weeks at West End Posted: 01 May 2014 06:15 AM PDT X Factor guru Simon Cowell has become the latest big name in show business to suffer an expensive pratfall in London's West End with the announcement that the musical I Can't Sing! he co-produced will close after a six-week run. The demise of the musical parody of the TV talent contest, which reportedly cost 6mil pounds (RM33mil) to produce, comes hard on the heels of the closures of new musicals by long-time West End and Broadway hotshots Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. It also follows the expensive 2012 fiasco of a musical based on the Spice Girls pop band. The closure of I Can't Sing! – which featured a talking dog and portrayed Cowell as a megalomaniac, played by Nigel Harman – was announced on the show's website and was also tweeted to its followers. "Stage Entertainment and Syco Entertainment, the producers of I Can't Sing! at the London Palladium, have announced the closure of the production on Saturday 10th May 2014," the statement on the website said. "The show received a series of rave reviews and standing ovations from thousands of theatre-goers following its opening earlier this year." Despite reviews praising the show's irreverence, it struggled to fill one of the West End's largest theatres, and on some nights a hoarding outside advertised the availability of choice seats for only 20 pounds just before curtain time. "The West End can be an unpredictable place as the closure of a number of high-profile productions recently has shown," said Rebecca Quigley, the CEO of Stage Entertainment. "I Can't Sing! has had audiences on their feet night after night, four and five star reviews from the critics and an amazing company and creative team, but it seems that isn't always enough."  Nigel Harman as Simon Cowell seen on stage in I Can't Sing!, the X Factor musical. Below is the ensemble performing a number called Please Simon, from the musical. According to the Daily Mail, Simon Cowell's company Syco lost £4mil on the doomed musical. The article also reported that it's been an especially bad time for the company as its new ventures, The X Factor USA, and a cooking reality show Food Glorious Food, had been receiving negative reactions from the public. But it probably won't dent his £347mil personal fortune. The West End and the London stage in general have been celebrating a successful period for ticket sales. Last year was a record for revenues and attendances, with more than 14 million theatre-goers and gross sales of over £585mil, according to the Society of London Theatre. Despite the healthy numbers, there have been some major casualties. Lloyd Webber's Stephen Ward, based on the 1960s Profumo sex scandal, closed after a run of less than four months. Meanwhile, lyricist Tim Rice's From Here to Eternity, based on the James Jones novel about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, closed the same day as Lloyd Webber's show after a six-month run. – Reuters |
| Picasso's masterpiece 'Guernica' gets a special dance performance Posted: 01 May 2014 12:40 AM PDT Pablo Picasso's anti-war masterpiece Guernica, one of modern art's most iconic paintings, served as a backdrop to a dance performance for the first time in its 77-year history. About 80 people sat on the floor or stood as Josue Ullate, a bare chested dancer in black tights, jumped and leapt in front of the large black-and-white canvas at Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum on Sunday, April 27. The 20-year-old performed Quiebro, a piece lasting about five minutes and inspired by a song written by late flamenco singer Enrique Morente that mixes modern ballet with traditional Spanish dance, two times, as part of International Dance Day celebrations. Watch it in the user-uploaded video below. It took organisers over a year of talks to get permission of Ullate to perform in front of the painting, which used images of distorted figures – human and animal – to represent the horrors of war. The Reina Sofia Museum initially turned down the request but eventually relented after Picasso's family gave their support to the project, daily newspaper El Pais reported. "I think it is an amazing idea, very good. They should do it all the time. This was special, it is Guernica. Marvellous," said Miguel Angel Colilla, a 44-year-old painter, after one of the performances. Ullate performed the piece – created by his father Victor Ullate, a renowned Spanish ballet dancer and choreographer – on a specially created sprung dance floor installed in the gallery where the painting hangs. Tickets to the one-time event which was held after the museum closed to the public were distributed for free on a first-come-first-served basis over the Internet. "It was stupendous. Aesthetically, the setting is perfect," said Bartolome Garrido, a 44-year-old lawyer who attended with his wife and their two young children. The Reina Sofia museum, a vast former hospital, displays Guernica – which measures 3.5m by 7.8m – in a purpose-built gallery on its own. Picasso created Guernica as a commission for Spain's Republican government to represent the country at the 1937 World Fair in Paris, as Spain writhed in a bloody civil war started by future dictator General Francisco Franco. The painting was transferred to Madrid in 1981 from New York's Museum of Modern Art, where it had been deposited on a long-term loan by Picasso until democracy was restored in Spain. For fear of attack, it was initially housed behind bullet-proof glass and under armed guard at the Prado Museum in Madrid before it was eventually transferred to the nearby Reina Sofia Museum when it opened in 1992. The painting took its name from Guernica, the ancestral capital of northern Spain's Basque country, which was bombed on April 26, 1937, a spring market day, by German and Italian air forces supporting Franco in a civil war that set the stage for World War II. – AFP Relaxnews |
| Grease musical is the word on TV Posted: 30 Apr 2014 09:00 AM PDT Grease, the Broadway musical and hit film, will be made into a live television production, US broadcaster Fox said on Monday (April 28), in the latest network television attempt to woo viewers with live performances. The musical about a high school romance between a good girl and a bad boy at Rydell High will be a three-hour production that will air next year. Actors have not been announced, but Fox said it would feature a "young ensemble cast". Fox, the broadcast unit of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc follows the lead of NBC, which attracted 19 million viewers to watch its live performance of The Sound Of Music last year, which starred country music singer Carrie Underwood. The musicals are part of networks' strategies to entice audiences to watch events live instead of recording them for later viewing on digital video recorders, which are less valuable to advertisers. Comcast Corp-owned NBC will air a live performance of Peter Pan in December in the hopes of replicating the success of The Sound Of Music. Grease debuted on stage in 1971 and was adapted into a film by distributor Paramount Pictures starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John (pic) in 1978. It currently ranks as the highest-grossing musical film in the United States with US$188mil (RM613mil) in ticket sales. – Reuters |
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